Exploring motivations for contributing to open source initiatives: The roles of contribution context and personal values

We explore contextual and dispositional correlates of the motivation to contribute to open source initiatives. We examine how the context of the open source project, and the personal values of contributors, are related to the types of motivations for contributing. A web-based survey was administered to 300 contributors in two prominent open source contexts: software and content. As hypothesized, software contributors placed a greater emphasis on reputation-gaining and self-development motivations, compared with content contributors, who placed a greater emphasis on altruistic motives. Furthermore, the hypothesized relationships were found between contributors’ personal values and their motivations for contributing.     

Motivations for Open Source Project Participation and Decisions of Software Developers

We provide a rationale for open source project participation by studying the decision problems of the software programmers, whose types are different in terms of ability and intrinsic motivation. We find that motivations, both intrinsic and extrinsic, and the ability level positively affect the optimal level of effort exerted by the programmers in the open source project. In the commercial project, the programmers with higher ability exert much effort although their high level of effort is not compensated properly. Thus, the open source project might be more likely to attract capable and motivated programmers than the commercial project.     

Open source software: A community of altruists

To learn about what drives people to devote their time and expertise to creating and supporting free/open source software, a survey with Likert-scaled items measuring different types of motivations was sent to contributors of several open source projects. Open-ended comments were used to illustrate the Likert-scaled items and open-ended questions allowed respondents to express their reasons for participating in these open source communities. Results indicate that the open source contributors (n = 110, 38 paid to work on OSS projects and 72 volunteers) are motivated primarily by a sense of altruism as well as the desire to create and learn. Payment did not significantly impact the reasons for contributing to OSS projects. The comments and open-ended questions validated the findings and indicated that building a “Utopian” community – the desire to help for the greater good worldwide – is one of the most important motivators. Also, respondents revealed that they join and persist as members of open source communities because they enjoy the freedom to create and share free software, tools and knowledge with others inside and outside the community.     

Open Source aus ökonomischer Sicht — Zu den institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen einer spenderkompatiblen Rentensuche

The analysis focuses on the basic institutional mechanisms governing open source software development. It explains why these institutional mechanisms enable rent-seeking without crowding out donative behavior. The “symbiotic” institutional arrangements translate into an ability to attract contributors with heterogeneous motivations.     

If it's fair,I’ll share: The effect of perceived knowledge validation justice on contributions to an organizational knowledge repository

The organizational value of an electronic knowledge repository depends on the degree to which it offers high quality knowledge to its users. Validation procedures are implemented to monitor and ensure the quality of submitted content. However, if perceived as unreasonable or unfair, validation can have the unintended effect of discouraging employee contributions. Drawing on organizational justice and fairness literatures, we show that both quality perceptions and contribution behaviors are positively influenced by perceived procedural justice of validation, which, in turn, is influenced by perceived informational and interpersonal justice. Implications for organizational knowledge management research and practice are discussed.     

Hybrid followee recommendation in microblogging systems

Bug reports are widely employed to facilitate software tasks in software maintenance. Since bug reports are contributed by people, the authorship characteristics of contributors may heavily impact the perfor-mance of resolving software tasks. Poorly written bug reports may delay developers when fixing bugs. However, no in-depth investigation has been conducted over the authorship characteristics. In this study, we first leverage byte-level N-grams to model the authorship characteristics and employ Normalized Simplified Profile Intersection (NSPI) to identify the similarity of the authorship characteristics. Then, we investigate a series of properties related to contributors’ authorship characteristics, including the evolvement over time and the variation among distinct products in open source projects. Moreover, we show how to leverage the authorship characteristics to facilitate a well-known task in software maintenance, namely Bug Report Summarization (BRS). Experiments on open source projects validate that incorporating the authorship characteristics can effectively improve a state-of-the-art method in BRS. Our findings suggest that contributors should retain stable authorship characteristics and the authorship characteristics can assist in resolving software tasks.

     

Volunteers’ involvement in online community based software development

We sought to gain understanding of voluntary developers’ involvement in open source software (OSS) projects. Data were collected from voluntary developers working on open source projects. Our findings indicated that a voluntary developer's involvement was very important to his or her performance and that involvement was dependent on individual motivations (personal software needs, reputation and skills gaining expectation, enjoyment in open source coding) and project community factors (leadership effectiveness, interpersonal relationship, community ideology). Our work contributes theoretically and empirically to the body of OSS research and has practical implications for OSS project management.     

Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for using a booth recommender system service on exhibition attendees’ unplanned visit behavior

Our study on unplanned behavior theory examines the effect of the booth recommender system (BRS) service on exhibitions arising from either extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. Previous studies have ignored the importance of the unplanned behavioral effectiveness through a BRS service that joins extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to deliver unexpected outcomes at exhibitions. In this paper, we propose a model for the impact of BRS service in which the perception of usefulness and the threats to freedom of choice mediate the effect of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation on unplanned booth visit behavior. We collected data from 101 exhibition visitors and analyzed the data using the partial least squares (PLS) method. Our findings indicate that intrinsic motivations (escape, event attractions) are significantly related to both the perceived usefulness of the BRS service and the threats to freedom of choice, while extrinsic motivation (information gain) were not significantly related to those characteristics. The perceived usefulness of the BRS service directly mediates the effect of escape and event attractions on unplanned booth visit behavior. The results and implications of these findings are further discussed in the paper.     

Are norms enough? The role of collaborative norms in promoting organizational knowledge seeking

Knowledge sharing, which is critical for the strategic utilization of knowledge resources for the benefit of an organization, can only take place when both knowledge contribution and knowledge seeking exist. However, most previous research has focused on only one side of this process – knowledge contribution motivations. This is despite the fact that various barriers to knowledge seeking and reuse exist, such as the effort required to seek relevant knowledge and the cost of future obligation. In overcoming such barriers, norms related to collaboration are considered to be important. However, little is known of how these norms operate in conjunction with other antecedents to influence individuals' knowledge seeking behavior. Addressing the knowledge gap, this study explores how collaborative norms in an organization impact knowledge seeking with regard to a common knowledge management system type – the electronic knowledge repository (EKR). For this purpose, we have developed a model and tested it through a survey of EKR users in knowledge-intensive organizations. Our results indicate that collaborative norms positively impact individuals' knowledge seeking behavior through EKRs, both directly and through reducing the negative effect of future obligation on seeking. However, collaborative norms could also undermine the positive impact of perceived usefulness on knowledge seeking behavior. We identify other antecedents of knowledge seeking such as knowledge growth, resource-facilitating conditions, and self-efficacy. Implications for research and knowledge sharing practice are discussed.     

Adoption of travel information in user-generated content on social media: the moderating effect of social presence

Travel patterns have gradually changed from group travel to individual travel. An increasing number of people acquire travel information through various types of media. One of the alternative information sources is social media, which enables users to exchange information among members. However, one of the characteristics of social media is information sharing, not information search, which involves both giving (i.e. posting) and taking (i.e. selective reading, forwarding, replying, linking, and liking) information. Compared to the ‘giving’ side of information-sharing research, less effort has been spent on the ‘taking’ side of information research. Therefore, we investigate travel information adoption in social media as well as how individuals communicate with each other. We use the elaboration likelihood model, which measures the impact of central (e.g. argument quality) and peripheral (e.g. credibility) cues on traveller information-sharing behaviour corresponding with social presence on social media. The results of an empirical analysis of 527 respondents, who were experienced in travel information adoption via social media, were examined. Our findings revealed that argument quality had a positive effect on perceived usefulness and source credibility positively affected perceived usefulness and social relationships. Perceived usefulness had a significant positive effect on social relationships. Both perceived usefulness and social relationships affected travel information adoption. Lastly, the levels of argument quality and source credibility perceived by social media members were found to differ according to the level of social presence.     

An Empirical Study on the Relationship Between Software Design Quality, Development Effort and Governance in Open Source Projects

The relationship among software design quality, development effort, and governance practices is a traditional research problem. However, the extent to which consolidated results on this relationship remain valid for open source (OS) projects is an open research problem. An emerging body of literature contrasts the view of open source as an alternative to proprietary software and explains that there exists a continuum between closed and open source projects. This paper hypothesizes that as projects approach the OS end of the continuum, governance becomes less formal. In turn a less formal governance is hypothesized to require a higher-quality code as a means to facilitate coordination among developers by making the structure of code explicit and facilitate quality by removing the pressure of deadlines from contributors. However, a less formal governance is also hypothesized to increase development effort due to a more cumbersome coordination overhead. The verification of research hypotheses is based on empirical data from a sample of 75 major OS projects. Empirical evidence supports our hypotheses and suggests that software quality, mainly measured as coupling and inheritance, does not increase development effort, but represents an important managerial variable to implement the more open governance approach that characterizes OS projects which, in turn, increases development effort.     

基于多维特征的开源项目个性化推荐方法

随着软件协同开发技术与社交网络的深度融合,社交化开发范式已成为当前软件创作与生产的重要方式。这一软件开发模型的灵活性与开放性,吸引了大规模的外围贡献者加入到开源社区中,形成了巨大的软件生产力。在开源社区中,这些分布广泛、规模巨大的外围贡献者主要以一种无组织的松散方式进行协同。他们需要花费大量的时间和精力,在海量的开源项目中寻找到自己真正感兴趣的项目并进行长期贡献。为了提高大规模群体协同的效率,本文提出一种基于多维特征的开源项目个性化推荐方法（即RepoLike）。该方法从开源项目自身流行度、关联项目技术相关度以及大众贡献者之间的社交关联度等三个维度度量开发者和开源项目之间的关联关系,并利用线性组合和Learning To Rank方法构建推荐模型,从而为开发者提供个性化的项目推荐服务。通过大规模的实证实验表明,RepoLike在推荐20个候选项目时的推荐命中率超过25%,能够有效地为开发人员提供有价值的推荐服务。     

An empirical study of information contribution to online feedback systems: A motivation perspective

Online feedback systems (OFSs) are increasingly available on online shopping websites; they allow consumers to post their ratings and consumption reviews for products. We employed motivation theory and a goal attainment perspective to model a set of motivating and inhibiting factors that could influence a consumer's intention to contribute to an OFS. Our experiment, which involved 168 university students, showed that a consumer's intention to contribute product reviews is influenced by perceived satisfaction gained in helping other consumers, perceived satisfaction gained in influencing the merchant, perceived probability of enhancing self-image, and perceived executional costs. In addition, the presence of an economic rewarding mechanism was found to promote a contribution when a consumer's perceived probability of enhancing self-image was relatively high or when perceived cognitive cost was relatively low. Implications of our findings are discussed.     

Online Crowdsourcing Campaigns: Bottom-Up versus Top-Down Process Model

ABSTRACT

When a crowd’s motivations are not triggered, they may not necessarily commit their best efforts, even if they have the knowledge to answer an open call. Drawing on the incentive theory, we introduce a top-down process model for an online crowdsourcing campaign that addresses the crowd’s motivations. This model is in contrast to the traditional bottom-up process model, where the crowd self-selects an open call based on their knowledge. We adopt a longitudinal case study method and examine two online crowdsourcing campaigns that represent both models. The findings suggest that the campaign that follows the top-down model generated high-quality ideas, while the bottom-up case was considered a failure. We further enrich the top-down model by developing a four-stage guidance model that addresses the crowd’s differing motivations in each stage. This research contributes to the crowdsourcing literature and helps better attract the qualifying crowd, thereby leading to greater campaign success likelihood.     

Latent Users in an Online User-Generated Content Community

Online communities depend on the persistent contributions of heterogeneous users with diverse motivations and ways of participating. As these online communities exist over time, it is possible that users change the way in which they contribute to the site. Through interviews with 31 long-term members of a user-generated content community who have decreased their participation on the site, we examined the meaning that these users gave to their contribution and how their new participation patterns related to their initial motivations. We complement the reader-to-leader framework (Preece and Shneiderman: AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13–32, 2009) by propounding the concept of latent user to understand decreasing content contribution and user life-cycles in online communities. We showed that even though latent users decrease their content contribution, their participation becomes more selective and remained consistent with initial motivations to participate.     

Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours: The impact of user effort and recommendation agent effort on perceived recommendation agent quality

Product recommendation agents (RAs) assist online firms to adapt their suggested offers to users’ preferences, thereby lowering users’ decision effort. The concept of effort is central in decision-making, yet it remains unclear whether it should be regarded as a cost or as a benefit improving the odds of a better decision. Building on Social Exchange theory, we suggest that interactions between users and RAs are driven by the concepts of perceived interdependence and reciprocity. We suggest that perceived user effort decreases the perceived RA quality, whereas RA effort increases the perceived RA quality. We conducted two experimental studies across different contexts. We found that users evaluate RAs based on their own expended effort, in relation to how much effort they perceived the RA has put into the process of generating recommendations. Such an effect is attenuated by users’ familiarity with the product context. Our findings offer important insights into how online firms can improve the use of their RAs.     

On the variation and specialisation of workload—A case study of the Gnome ecosystem community

Most empirical studies of open source software repositories focus on the analysis of isolated projects, or restrict themselves to the study of the relationships between technical artifacts. In contrast, we have carried out a case study that focuses on the actual contributors to software ecosystems, being collections of software projects that are maintained by the same community. To this aim, we defined a new series of workload and involvement metrics, as well as a novel approach— $\widetilde{\mathbf{T}}$ -graphs—for reporting the results of comparing multiple distributions. We used these techniques to statistically study how workload and involvement of ecosystem contributors varies across projects and across activity types, and we explored to which extent projects and contributors specialise in particular activity types. Using Gnome as a case study we observed that, next to coding, the activities of localization, development documentation and building are prevalent throughout the ecosystem. We also observed notable differences between frequent and occasional contributors in terms of the activity types they are involved in and the number of projects they contribute to. Occasional contributors and contributors that are involved in many different projects tend to be more involved in the localization activity, while frequent contributors tend to be more involved in the coding activity in a limited number of projects.     

On organisational influences in software standards and their open source implementations

ContextIt is widely acknowledged that standards implemented in open source software can reduce risks for lock-in, improve interoperability, and promote competition on the market. However, there is limited knowledge concerning the relationship between standards and their implementations in open source software. This paper reports from an investigation of organisational influences in software standards and open source software implementations of software standards. The study focuses on the RDFa standard and its implementation in the Drupal project.ObjectiveThe overarching goal of the study is to establish organisational influences in software standards and their implementations in open source software. More specifically, our objective is to establish organisational influences in the RDFa standard and its implementation in the Drupal project.MethodBy conduct of a case study of the RDFa standard and its implementation in the Drupal project we investigate organisational influences in software standards and their implementations in open source software. Specifically, the case study involved quantitative analyses of issue tracker data for different issue trackers for W3C RDFa and the Drupal implementation of RDFa.ResultsThe case study provides details on how and to what extent organisational influences occur in W3C RDFa and the Drupal implementation of RDFa, by specifically providing a characterisation of issues and results concerning contribution to issue raising and commenting, organisational involvement over time, and individual and organisational collaboration on issues.ConclusionWe find that widely deployed standards can benefit from contributions provided by a range of different individuals, organisations, and types of organisations either directly to a standardisation project or indirectly via an open source project implementing the standard. Further, we also find that open processes for standardisation adopted by W3C may also contribute to open source projects implementing specific standards.     

Input control and its signalling effects for complementors' intention to join digital platforms

Existing information systems (IS) research on platform control has largely focused on examining how input control (i.e., the mechanisms used to control platform access) affects complementors' intentions and behaviours after their decision to join a digital platform. Yet, our understanding of how input control is perceived before this decision and how such perceptions influence prospective complementors' intention to join a platform is still nascent. In this regard, our study views input control as a salient signal that shapes prospective complementors' expected benefits and costs (i.e., their performance and effort expectancy), and ultimately their decision to join a digital platform. Drawing on signalling theory and the antecedent-benefit-cost (ABC) framework, we conducted a randomized online experiment in the context of donation-based crowdfunding. The experiment results offer empirical support for this view by showing that input control has distinct and complex signalling effects for prospective complementors. In particular, our findings reveal curvilinear and competing signalling effects, with perceived input control increasing both performance expectancy (at a decreasing rate) and effort expectancy (at an increasing rate). Also, we find that performance expectancy linearly increases prospective complementors' intention to join a platform, whereas effort expectancy linearly decreases their intention to do so. These findings imply that the overall relationship between perceived input control and intention to join follows an inverted U-shape curve, which means that neither a low nor a high, but a moderate degree of perceived input control maximizes prospective complementors' intention to join. In sum, the results of our study provide novel and important insights into the signalling role that perceived input control plays in shaping prospective complementors' decision to join a digital platform.